Sputterpub's Blog

It was never calm in room 312 when Michelle was there. She smoked incessantly and she tossed her lit matches into the round metal waste basket. After the third trashcan fire, Mel had to conclude that Michelle liked the flames. They managed to extinguish the flares themselves except one time. Then firefighters poured into their hall to the sounds of the floor alarms and the usual yell of “Man on floor.”

Mel knew that Moe slapped Michelle sometimes, and it may have been disloyal and politically incorrect of Mel to even think it, but her roommate seemed to ask for it. It was like a dance Michelle and Moe performed and each knew the steps; the reward was some kind of fabulous makeup sex, busy mouths locked on each other’s loins for hours, hours – a scene that Mel and Mike couldn’t imagine well enough to mock.

Mel once saw it from the other side. Instead of being in the dorm room studying when Michelle tromped in, she was at the fight when Michelle stomped out. They were all at Moe’s and Nasri’s place. Mike and Nasri were playing a long game of chess and Mel was reading when sounds of profound argument began in the bedroom. Epithets and drawer slamming.

Soon they were in view. She was leaving, he was following yelling, she was turning screaming, and he was reaching for her at the door, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her a little to emphasize his words. It was scary, so sudden, but then Mel saw that Michelle was moving under those hand-covered shoulders, resonating like a tuning fork, amplifying the sway till her back was smacking the door. Mel witnessed her helping the passion look good before she tore out of there for the privacy of her bouncing bed.

Mel saw all that, the choreography, and appreciated it like a good observer. But she somehow never realized that the sags and shadows of Michelle’s body signified more than harmless ventures into sex. Why that girl had birthed at least one baby, and Mel never knew it till recently, gazing at her own used belly, thinking back.

West Virginia. Michelle never went back. She and Moe didn’t make it of course; neither did Mel and Mike. Mel lost touch with her after their freshman year, but she heard tidings of her last month.

Michelle married a fireman. They moved to Nevada. She settled down in the Sparks area and raised four kids.

Mel got the news from Alain’s wife Rita, after connecting with them on the Internet. Alain seems successful: a tenured math professor well-married to a self-employed businesswoman. Through them she learned about Nasri’s disability and Moe’s death in a rock climbing accident. They told her one knew where Mike was. They forwarded some e-mails from Michelle.

Her letters were creepy. It sounded like she had gone completely over to the other side. An avid church participant. Probably fundamentalist. Profoundly anti-choice. So consistent about denying her past deviance that she sounded like she believed the rewrite herself. It was easy to resist re-acquainting with her.

The view of Michelle is much more satisfying from here, thirty-eight years backward, noticing clues that Mel never thought of then. She can still see Moe edged forward on his chair, fired by argument, punctuating his opinions with sharp drags on the unfiltered cigarette between his orange fingertips. She’ll never erase the vision of wide-eyed Michelle in vehement, naked, chaotic bounce. They were young then, weary and excitable, coiled in abusive ballet. They’ll always be action figures on the sex side of Mel’s shelves.

There was a posse of guys from Wilmington, but after some sifting three emerged distinct: two Alans and a Moe. The first Alan was brilliant at math and adept at French, and he was just then changing his name spelling to Alain. He had lank dark hair and acne-scarred cheeks and decided the night they met that he was in love with Mel. The second Alan went by his last name, Nasri, which was as strange as coming from Delaware. He was wide-eyed and fat-cheeked and no one ever saw him work at anything except chess. Mel’s not sure he ever graduated. She heard he went straight from Cal to Social Security for some mental disability, and she knows it’s unkind but she can’t ignore all the acid he dropped – she’s sure whatever he has was self-induced.

Then there was Moe-who-would-be-called-Maurice. He was medium tall with medium brown hair, and he affected a slouch like James Dean. He looked insolent and a little dangerous, but he was just Morris Zimmerman from Wilmington, and Mel never realized till now that on top of being just Moe from Delaware, bombastic about books and politics and really not very good at French, his name almost certainly meant he grew up Jewish, and somehow, even after all the guidance Mel got from her aunt and her mother and the rest of the sisterhood, she didn’t notice that. Then too, she never realized that Nasri was an Arabic name, with whatever that suggests.

Moe and Alain and Nasri sauntered into the orientation dance the night Mel and Michelle moved in, and they zigzagged through the crowd – “Hi. Where you from? What’s your major?” – till they got to the roommates. Then Alain fell in love with Mel, Moe and Michelle sparked like a match and gasoline, and Nasri shuffled.

Mel’s social life took a little turn. She didn’t leave her dormitory neighborhood to spend as much time with Ellen as she had imagined she would. The boys were a year older and lived in apartments a block away. They had kitchens and no curfews, which felt almost as liberating to the girls as moving out of their parents’ houses; they couldn’t resist stepping into real-life unsupervised apartments. Mel and Michelle grew closer than they otherwise would have: spent more time together out of their room than in it; talked about the boys when they weren’t with them. Mel didn’t return Alain’s regard but they managed to be friends. Within a month she connected with his pal Mike from D.C., so she was in the picture with or without Alain. She and Mike were relatively hot. Enough so to trade their virginities on a striped mattress on Spaulding Street that December. But they couldn’t hold a candle to the passion that was Michelle and Moe.

“The thing is,” Michelle used to start her speeches to Mel in their room, forefinger aimed like a pistol shaking with her vehemence. “The thing is…” Mel will always remember her stabbing the air with those words. She’d be bouncing naked on her twin bed, on her side of the room, hair flapping, breasts swaying, belly shaking, angrily declaiming over some offense of Moe’s, threatening to kill herself, to throw that unclad body from the window at her side, even though they were only three floors up and the sliding glass only opened six inches. Small as Michelle was, even she would never wedge through that space.

It seemed like the only time she spent in the dorm was after a fight with Moe. She’d storm in, heated, flushed, indignant at least, and pull off clothes she’d worn too long. She had fine-pored olive skin and her big breasts hung in U’s like Mel’s mother’s. Her aureoles were brown instead of pallid pink like Mel’s. She was slim but her belly draped a bit over her crotch, wiggled oddly when she then climbed to bounce on her small toes on her small bed, O-eyed and O-mouthed with that finger out: “The thing is…”

Well sure Mel has a split personality. Who doesn’t? It’s not a problem unless it’s a problem.

She’s always been bright. Very cerebral.

And she’s always been fascinated with sex.

So she has two strains of relationships: the deviants and the nerds. They never meet.

There was freckled Betty, who she taught to masturbate at five. Catholic Nora and their fifth grade theology debates. Then Candy, always into sex, who practiced deep kissing on her when they were ten, who joined Mel at eleven in shallow caves behind the school for sessions of self-molestation, and who had to drop out of tenth grade, pregnant with the first of her five odd-fathered babies. Mel’s brilliant careful best-friend Ellen, discovered in high school, multi-laterally religious and scientific too, with whom she sought the answers to the ultimate metaphysical questions. Dark Michelle in college. Mary, ingenious and distracted, deep in ADD, Mel’s first attempt at a business partnership at thirty. Vee, just Vee, for overdrinking and overdrugging, for groups and gropes and the death knell to the Mary venture.

It’s Michelle she’s remembering now. Michelle and Moe. He affected Frenchness and asked everyone to call him Maurice, but his birth certificate read Morris Zimmerman. Mel was struck when they declared to her that oral sex was better than genital. Their statement blew her away. Mel was a virgin then.

She met them when she first came to college. But the retrospective is a better view.

The memories formed in Berkeley. The year was 1967 and the cast of characters assembled in September. Mel had selected her dormitory site unseen, solely for its proximity to Telegraph Avenue. She and Ellen had been parentally prohibited from sharing a room, owing to a recent (chaste) misadventure involving a bonfire and older boys at Stinson Beach. Mel had no roommate preference other than her best friend. So she picked the residential obelisk closest to all the action, and she took her chances with random assignment. She got Michelle.

There was no sign of her when Mel’s parents delivered their first-born to room 312. Michelle made her appearance soon after they left.

“Are you my new roomie?” Her voice piped like a child’s, lilting on “room.”

Mel turned away from organizing her underwear drawer, to first sight. She felt no love and little interest. She intended to get along with her roommate of course, but Michelle was no Ellen. She sounded and looked a lot like what Mel was trying to escape.

Michelle was cute. Short, small, with sleek brown hair longer than Mel’s, round chocolatey eyes, a pert nose, big breasts, tiny feet. Her lips weren’t full but the upper one curled poutily. Her fingers were short and her palms were plump.

“Where you from?” she continued after Mel smiled and nodded greeting at her. That voice! High, thin and sweet. Mel wondered if Michelle’s vocal chords were shorter than her own.

“Oh, I just crossed the Bay. You?”

“West Virginia.”

Mel was floored. She’d heard of West Virginia but she didn’t know precisely where it was. West of Virginia, obviously, and she knew Virginia was somewhere near Washington, but she didn’t know U.S. geography then. She’s learned it since, through Internet games, and she thinks West Virginia has the funniest shape of the fifty.

Coal mines. Mountains. What they call mountains in the East anyway. Mountains with their tops shaved off, for coal. That’s what Mel had heard about West Virginia. What she asks now is: why was Michelle coming all the way to Cal?

For that matter, Mel wonders now and wonders why she didn’t then about the homes of all the other students she met during orientation. Half of them were from LA (Grant High School or Uni), but all the rest were out-of-state. There were kids from Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Montana. A clot of them from Washington, D.C. But the group of young men who became her friends were from Delaware.

Delaware. The state that makes Maryland look big. The place with Chancery Court and a reverence for corporations. Traveling all the way to UC…

No lifelong relationships came out of Room 6, but none of them forgot their time together. Melanie’s family moved out of the area at the beginning of her junior year in high school, but she corresponded with a few friends and later followed some lives on the Internet.

She was a little surprised about Keith’s success. She learned that he didn’t exhibit psychopathic or sociopathic qualities as an adult. He never became attractive or eloquent, but what started out as drug dealing in late high school morphed into a legitimate import business, and he took off as an entrepreneur. He’d been importing hashish from Pakistan and he got into rugs and carpets. He became acquainted with a small community of weavers and began supplying them with organic dyes instead of the chemically-fabricated tints that developed nations had furnished. His trade became so successful that he abandoned drugs and expanded his legitimate activities. He married, fathered two daughters, and tried to do right by them. One of the daughters was diagnosed as on the spectrum, and that led Keith to some serious financial and time involvement with an autism nonprofit.

Steve’s hyperactivity increased as he got older. It was not helped by his cocaine use. Probably the only thing that kept him from moving on to meth addiction was the gambling he took up at 25. He was good at cards but bad at poker face. He bottomed out five years later, after his second wife left him and he lost his sixth job. He joined Synanon, got clean and fanatic, and entered the trades. He became a fair electrician and a good stone mason. He liked construction because the career limited the number of appointments he had to make, and by then he was thoroughly sick of missing appointments. His third wife told him he had Attention Deficit Disorder but he argued about the “disorder” part of it. He said he was just fine. Before she left him she urged him to get help, but Kaiser told him he was too functional for therapy. They referred him to an ADD support group, but that didn’t work; the members kept forgetting to show up at meetings.

Patrick’s life was the sad surprise. He made it to adulthood, he received enough speech therapy that the stutter became socially acceptable, he married and produced a child of each gender. And then he killed himself. He pulled a drycleaning bag over his head and suffocated on the floor of his study. He left reams of personal journals, in some of which his old friend Melanie was mentioned. His widow then searched her out, and the two women got together for lunch. Patrick’s wife flooded the table with words. Melanie left that encounter convinced that her old pal had been gay and alcoholic and not happy at all.

Melanie married three times before she concluded that it wasn’t the right state for her. She had two children by her first husband, and raised them. She became a business consultant for a living and an unpublished writer from compulsion. She continued to take exception to most generalizations, headlines, and popular conclusions. She developed a precise and compelling way of expressing her ideas, but rarely acquires agreement from others. As far as Melanie’s concerned, everyone has a cognitive issue, and life is a process of discovering and accommodating one another. Her friends haven’t embraced that viewpoint, but they no longer challenge it.

Melanie didn’t forget Room 6. None of the core four did. Steve simplified his experience into an “I hate school” and “School is Jail” philosophy. If he’d had children, he probably would have homeschooled them. Keith ended up on the local school board and unable to sell any of his radical ideas. Patrick wrote some of his into his journals. Melanie was always ready to discuss the subject. All of them had learned that school as they experienced it didn’t work very well. The days were too long, the classes were too full, and the teacher had to pitch instruction to the middle, so the kids who didn’t live in the bulb of the bell curve were not well served.

The posse in Room 6 had come to agreement about what needed to be done. They knew the school day should be shortened – they liked the idea of four hours. They figured that school should run year-round. And they were certain that kids need to be taught by other kids and through narrative. They would have broken classrooms into small groups and had at least half of the lessons told by older student mentors.

No one listened to them, then or now.

Melanie was spending so much time in Room 6 that she was starting to think of it as her own. She had to share it with a few boys, but they weren’t objecting to her little acts of propriety, and they were even taking cues from her about where and when to sit.

All of the inhabitants were supposed to sit at all times – that was one of the purposes of Room 6 – but the group wasn’t very rowdy considering their outlaw status, and Mr. Peterson was starting to leave them unsupervised for quarter hours at a time.

Four of them were regulars. They made it to Room 6 just about every schoolday. Usually there was an additional student or two. Melanie can’t recall a time when there were more than seven kids in the room. She was always the only girl.

The core four came from the same classroom. Their teacher couldn’t handle them and requested their removal. Miss McDaniels wasn’t a strong personality and was a mediocre instructor. But she had 28 other students; she had to extract the bad four or she would have had chaos in the classroom and zero educational progress.

Four bad apples in a barrel of 32, Melanie thought much later. That seemed like a high percentage of unacceptable behavior. One-eighth, she calculated: 12.5%. Sometimes statistics astounded grown Melanie: like the time she counted up the excellent teachers she’d experienced (four), and divided by the number of the profession she’d had through high school (at least 67) and obtained the dismal 5.9% that made her challenge the cultural conclusion that teachers in general were unsung heroes.

The academic year of Room 6 was 1960-61. The place was Chula Vista. The grade was sixth. The students were members of the huge cohort that would be called baby boomers, and they were pioneers in crowding. They were blazing trails without vocabulary. When they became parents there would be words like detention and autism, acronyms like ADHD and DSM IV, phrases like “disruptive behavior” and “behavior contract” and “zero tolerance policy.” But in 1960, there wasn’t much more than “not working to potential.”

The core four delinquents in Room 6 were a mixed lot. Keith was ugly and truculent, Steve was handsome and dashing in an obnoxious way, Patrick was nondescript in appearance and distracting in speech, and Melanie was contentious. She argued with teachers, staff, students, textbooks, and test questions.

Physically the four were average. Keith was chubby, and to Melanie he looked like Fred Flintstone. Steve was athletic and could have been the son of Superman and Reggie. Patrick ran like a girl and reminded her of Dobie Gillis. Melanie aspired to Katy Keene and achieved Little Dot. But they were all in the acceptable range. It was their actions that set them apart from their classmates.